Cronos
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All actors and roles (10)
All team (27)
Short description
An alchemist who fled the Spanish Inquisition for Mexico built a small mechanical device in the sixteenth century that was said to grant eternal life, though it demanded blood from whoever used it. He died in 1937, and the secret seemed to die with him. Decades later, an elderly antiques dealer named Jesus Gris finds the device hidden inside an angel statue and starts it by accident. As he uses it, he grows younger, but he also becomes dependent on it and develops a craving for blood. A wealthy, dying industrialist learns of the device and pursues it for himself.
Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed Cronos, his first feature, released in 1993 and followed by Mimic in 1997. Federico Luppi plays Jesus Gris, with Ron Perlman as the industrialist's enforcer Angel de la Guardia, Claudio Brook as the industrialist De la Guardia, Margarita Isabel as Mercedes and Tamara Shanath as Aurora. The film runs 94 minutes and was made in Mexico for about 2 million dollars.
Critical response was warmer than general audience response: it holds 7.3/10 from 60 reviews, while on IMDb it sits at 6.7/10 from 36,000 votes and on TMDB at 6.7/10 from 799 votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- The role of Jesus Gris was originally written for Max von Sydow.
- The plot stipulated that the Angel was to speak fluent Spanish. It turned out, however, that the actor playing the role could speak Spanish, but his speech could not be used in the film, so the script was rewritten and the character was made a US emigrant who hates Mexico and his own presence there so much that he deliberately speaks poor Spanish – a language he barely knows.
- Two guards were deliberately made somewhat caricatured. Guillermo del Toro later said he did this in retaliation for numerous Hollywood films in which Mexicans are depicted schematically and stereotypically.
- The Alchemist at the beginning of the film bears the surname Fulcanelli. Under this name lived one of the most famous alchemists of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, who mysteriously disappeared without a trace in the 1940s and was never seen again.
- The filmmakers were allocated a budget of $1.5 million, but they exceeded it, and the budget reached $2 million (at that time this was the most expensive Mexican film in production). The director, Guillermo del Toro, scraped together half a million himself by taking out loans, Ron Perlman agreed to a significant reduction in his fee for filming, and since then Perlman and del Toro have become close friends who have repeatedly worked together.
- At the beginning of the film, the viewer sees a 'No Parking' sign. These signs with inscriptions in Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, and Russian were created specifically for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The text refers to Eje Central Lazaro Cardenas, one of the central streets of Mexico City, where the Palace of Fine Arts and the national bank are located.
- All the 'magical' devices made for the film were stolen after filming ended. Those currently kept by director Guillermo del Toro are simply copies.
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